Thinking about Intel's customer, I guess IBM also would be a prominent name...isn't it? Since IBM claims to be the largest Cloud service provider and coming up with Big Data Analysis in a big way, I don't see a reason why Intel would not think about IBM as one of their key customers. What do you think?

Hard to compare to ARM's customization efforts, since there are few details available from Intel on just how its customizaiton program will work, but the possibilities include adding additional features like specialized accelerators, tweaking existing features like higher clock rates more bandwidth, customizing using its own IP blocks or adding external IP from the customer.

Colin, any insights on how this change in business model shall impact ARM's server dreams as ARM claims one advantage that OEMs get by adopting ARM servers is that servers can be customized as per the requirements?

Good questions all, but I don't think many answers will be available until next year when we get some examples. To hazard a guess, I'd say Google, Amazon and the like are buying Xeons in suffiencent quantity to be a "key" customer. Also some supercomputers use a lot of cores all by themselves, such as Milky Way which just won the Top500 with over three million cores.

I have to wonder who those key customers might be and how much of the market they would involve. I know that hard-core PC gamers like to overclock their systems, but this would potentially go well beyond that. Is the Intel architecture really modular enough to support a chinese menu approach to CPU design? What kind of volume would be required to qualify as a "key" customer? And finally, what are the implications for the software tool chain to the modifications?

Colin, something is not adding up for me...in teh title you say "customize", that menas to me many different versions for different applications, customers, etc...but then you add "highest integration" which implies one die that can do many things...kind of contrary to "customization"...I must be missing something here...Kris